Good to hear that. It really was unaffordable.
While travel might not have cost a lot, free prescriptions must have cost mega.
Well, not all the citizens are meant to flourish in the USA. We still have a constituency for what is in some ways a slavery economy. The insistence on not paying a living wage, the insistence on decades-long prison terms for a variety of crimes, the sheer raving hatred for anything that could be called “welfare” or “socialism”–these come from a powerful vocal constituency that demands cheap labor and cheap goods.
All prescriptions are free to everyone in Scotland.
I think you’ll find the “masters of the universe”, the willfully blind political class and a benign legal framework were responsible for the finanical crisis, not some old duffers on a bus.
Prescriptions are still free for pensioners (not sure what the age limits are right now), but that’s probably cheaper than paying for emergency treatment.
Don’t most developed/first world countries give free healthcare to senior citizens? I was under the impression even the US did.
Yeah. I do struggle with the idea that it’s the sick, the old, the disabled and the unemployed who’re the problem.
Especially the unemployed, because you can normally get people to sympathise with the other groups to at least some extent. But the unemployed are apparently just lazy, and their laziness is cyclical. The more available jobs there are, the less lazy they get.
Who could have predicted that?
I think the fact that our system is significantly less generous than having even a minimal job has something to do with that. If unemployment paid more than a job, people would be less likely to work. Most people aren’t altruistic enough to work for less than they could get from the government. People respond to incentives in a predictable way.
Well, but the UK system does not generally (with a few exceptions) pay more than one could earn working.
But it seems strange to argue that people work out of “altruism”. I don’t think they do - they work because they want a decent life and that normally requires money. So yes, British folks can survive on what they’ll get on welfare, just, but most of us would like more. And to get more, we need to work.
But do Britons get less from the system than they would for even a minimal job? Is it better to work for McDonald’s, or be on welfare?
In the US, we incentivize work with an Earned Income Tax Credit(working people get extra money at tax time if they make under a certain amount), and in addition food stamps can be used by working people to help make ends meet. Plus, welfare here sucks. It keeps you alive, and barely at that. So no one starves, but even flipping burgers is vastly superior to welfare. Plus if you are able-bodied and don’t get a job in two years, you get cut off from cash welfare benefits.
Good lord, adaher, please get educated on the topic. If you are able-bodied and do not have dependent children you get NO cash payments at all from our current system, and that’s been true since 1996. ONLY families with dependent children get any cash at all, and the time limit is 5 years in a lifetime, not two.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.
Accepting that Broomstick has questioned your basic assumptions here regarding the US system, it is almost always better to work full time at minimum wage than it is to claim welfare benefits in the UK. The system you are describing is not all that different from the one we have here, except that almost all benefits in the UK are cash.
The only way that working might not be worth it, financially, is if you have a huge family. The average UK welfare recipient has the same number of children as anyone else in this country - one or two.
This is why it’s difficult to have these conversations- there really isn’t a nationwide system. Eligibility for Federally-funded benefits is the same nationwide - families including children up to 60 months. But states can provide additional benefits with their own funding -in my state, childless adults can get cash benefits and once you’ve reached the limit on cash benefits (2 years) you can still receive non-cash benefits such as two-party checks and vouchers. And you can get 2 years of the state-funded cash benefits after receiving 60 months of Federally funded benefits.
That certainly does make matters confusing. In the UK, there are no means-tested benefits with strict time limits. You could (in theory) live off them all of your life. What a hell of a life that would be, but it is possible and it does happen.
Not many people choose that life, although compared to other European countries, we’re pretty bad at social mobility. Compared to the US, though, this place is a paradise in that regard.
The difference is that you are capable of distinguishing between Federal and state benefits and are able to succinctly convey the differences. adaher blithely states “two years cash” without any qualification and apparently no awareness that that is not a universal benefit in the US. That is highly misleading.
Did I mention children? No. Did I mention lifetime? No. The 2-year limit is how long you can get TANF at once.
Good lord, broomstick. That wasn’t a correction, it was nitpicking.
I’ve always heard that it was the habitually homeless in America who typically have drug/alcohol or mental problems. Most people who wind up homeless in the United States are only that way temporarily. They’re able to get back up on their feet with either state assistance or the help of friends and family.
Most of Europe believed in the Christian God at the time our social security networks first got defined, but generally not in a God that gives money to those who are just. While the biggest denomination in the US is the RCC, US culture is permeated and was defined by people who did (do) believe that.
Also, there is an enormous difference between “God never gives you more than you can handle” and “God never gives you more than you can handle on your own”.
No, compared to the US, the UK is about the same. See the wiki article I linked to up-thread: Socio-economic mobility in the United States:
The problem with those studies though is that they measure in quintiles. The wealthier a country is, the most it gets penalized in such studies, since you have farther to go to go from one quintile to another.
A better way to measure income mobility would be to simply measure income growth or decline over generations. If an American is raised in a household that makes $30,000/yr and at 30 he’s making $60,000/yr, that’s great, right? No, it just puts him up one quintile. But in Sweden, that would probably be worth two quintiles, so it makes Sweden appear more socially mobile.
I assume you are being sarcastic.
However, it is a fact that countries with a generous welfare system cannot get people on welfare to move to other parts of the country where work is available, even if it is unskilled, and it is necessary to bring in people from other countries to do that work, while also paying welfare to able bodied people fully capable of working.
Just look at the “surfer dude” that had his 15 minutes of fame recently.
If someone can travel all the way from the other side of the world to get a job in the States or the UK, why can’t someone in those countries travel a few hundred miles to get work?
However it could also be something to do with the fact that people with a degree in “media studies” ( for example ) aren’t educated to do job that is actually in demand like engineering or plumbing or electrical or farming, or welding etc etc etc. Businesses that deal with trades just can’t get enough workers that can do the job.